"If We Make Waves, We'll Be Jailed"
Nathan, Debbie
"DON'T USE MY NAME," SAYS A WOMAN whom I'll call Perla. "I already have enough probterm." A 16-year-old mothei of six. Perla lives in a squatters' settlement in c'iudadiudrez. the Mexican city...
...For years...
...All my life I helped in the fields and picked coCoa," she remembers...
...the Mexican city just south of El Paso, Texas...
...The child neer came forward either...
...Perla and other workers also have problems with the El Paso police...
...When the responding officer learned she was undocumented, he refused to make a report arid instead turned her over to the Bonier Patrol...
...the Mexican government has depressed agricultural commodities prices while simultaneously withdrawing loan assistance to small farmers...
...On a good day in El Paso she makes at least twice that...
...We were the last of my family to leave...
...Towards the end we were hunting prairie dogs for food...
...tome on...
...She's not the only commuter...
...We have no choice...
...The agents were laughing...
...We're afntid if we make waves, we'll be jailed," Perla says...
...In Juarez, Perla found that women working in the maqwladora assembly plants make about $8 a day...
...indignant, she swore out an affidavit at the local Mexican -on&tlate, But Perla and others were afraid to talk with Justice Department investigators, who later dismissed the complaint as unfounded...
...But not all days are good, mainly because of run-ins with abusive immigration officers...
...You can't survive in the countryside anymore," Perla says...
...nevertheless, Perla and her husband feel they're doing better now than five years ago...
...Once two Border Patrol agents caught me and my [nineyear-old] daughter Lily at the river," she recalls...
...legions of undocumented Mexicanshave waded iheriver, darted across busy Interstate 10...
...Then they poked him in his buttocks csith ballpoint pens...
...The international border there the Rio Grande River is often little more than a trickle, and Perla crosses almost daily to sell fruit and candy door-to door in El Paso...
...where's the dope'?' they kept saying, and they poked him in the ribs with their guns...
...A young guy on the Mexico side was cursing at them, so they tooL out machine guns and fired at him for five minutes...
...But the law doesn't stop people like Perla...
...when they still lived in their nati...
...scuttledthrough drainageculverts...
...Even so, her children haven't fared as badly as one boy she saw detained earlier this year "The agents told him to take off his underwear...
...It just makes things harder," she says...
...Perla says...
...Another time they grabbed a young man who sells fruit...
...They are not supposed to stop people to check immigration status, but "a policeman picked me up once...
...Federal lav, particularly the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, prohibits virtually all this activity...
...We have to make a living in El Paso...
...Her day hegin.s in the family's one-room shack...
...Border Patrol agents have locked me and my kids up for seven hours without food or water," Perla says...
...Her niece, also fruit vcndor.oncecalledpoliceto report shehad heeu robbed at knife point and threatened with rape...
...It has a dirt floor and no running water...
...e ejid.o some S miles south...
...Lily was hysterical: she thought we'd all be killed...
...and, if lucky...
...finally made it to work asEl Paso's domestic sen ants, gardeners, construction workers, dishwashers and vendors...
...Over the past several years...
...He made me give him all my money.'4 she says...
...El Paso-based writer Debbie Nathan i.c active in the Border Rig/its Coalition qf El Paso and Oudad Juarez...
Vol. 26 • July 1992 • No. 1
